This year's DPL election campaign has now officially started.
Three candidates are running for DPL this year:
Moray Allan,
Gergely Nagy and
Lucas Nussbaum.
There is already quite an active debate on the
debian-vote mailing list,
where people can ask the candidates questions about their platforms.
So far, the main topics discussed have been:
questions about
recruitment
of new contributors and
mentoring;
the use of Debian's
money and the possibility of
fundraising
campaigns to renew Debian's core hardware infrastructure;
and possible changes to the constitutional role of the DPL, including
the creation
of a DPL board or
changing the length
of the term of office.
The campaign will end on 30 March, and will be followed by a two-week voting period.
These early days of the 2013 DPL campaign have been very
intense; as a mere voter I'm struggling to keep up with the debian-vote
backlog. Still, it's incredibly refreshing to see such a democratic battle
between volunteers eager to offer their free time as DPL. Volunteerism in free
software is in very good health, it seems, said Stefano Zacchiroli, who has been DPL for
the last three years.

Lisandro Damián Nicanor Pérez Meyer blogged about his
experience with the Debian freeze as a Debian Developer. Lisandro, who is a
member of the Qt/KDE team, intensified his activity during the freeze, reviewing
patches, applying them and testing the fixes. With help from the other members of
the team, Lisandro has done eleven uploads of Qt to get it ready for the new release.
He explains that during the freeze, communication within and between teams is
crucial, as the energies of all Debian Developers are focused on releasing, and
that requires a great deal of coordination. And the team that
is put under the greatest amount of stress during the freeze is the Release
Team. From the outside, communicating with the RT was a kind of "special
art", and not an easy one, explained Lisandro, who then lists some useful
hints for communicating with the Release Team in an effective way.

Raphaël Hertzog
blogged
about the birth of Kali
Linux 1.0, a new Debian derivative developed by
Offensive Security to be an advanced and stable penetration testing distribution.
Mati Aharoni, lead Kali developer, explained that Debian
provides a reliable base to build a new distribution and yet can
easily be customized to add bleeding edge features, thanks to the
unstable and experimental distributions.
Raphaël, who helped the Kali team in setting up their technical
infrastructure as a Debian derivative, also added that not
only will most Kali applications be integrated into Debian, but
Offensive Security is also willing to dedicate a node of
their armhf cluster for Debian's own use.

Do you want to organise a Debian booth or a Debian install party? Are you aware of other upcoming Debian-related events? Have you delivered a Debian talk that you want to link on our talks page? Send an email to the Debian Events Team.

One applicant has been accepted as a Debian
Developer and two applicants have been accepted
as Debian Maintainers since the previous issue of the Debian Project News.
Please welcome Balint Reczey, Alexander Chernyakhovsky
and Alexandre Raymond into our project.

According to the Bugs Search interface of the Ultimate Debian Database, the upcoming release, Debian Wheezy, is currently affected by 115 Release-Critical bugs. Ignoring bugs which are easily solved or on the way to being solved, roughly speaking, about 74 Release-Critical bugs remain to be solved for the release to happen.

Please note that these are a selection of the more important security advisories of the last weeks. If you need to be kept up to date about security advisories released by the Debian Security Team, please subscribe to the security mailing list (and the separate backports list, and stable updates list) for announcements.

Please help us create this newsletter. We still need more volunteer writers to watch the Debian community and report about what is going on. Please see the contributing page to find out how to help. We're looking forward to receiving your mail at debian-publicity@lists.debian.org.